By Tom Symonds

Home Affairs correspondent

The majority of the service which tries to prevent criminals reoffending in England and Wales is working at excessive capacity, internal figures seen by the BBC show.

Some officers in the Probation Service have workloads twice as large as their recommended capacity.

A whistleblower warned the risks to the public are "significant".

The government said it would "recruit thousands more staff to keep the public safe".

The revelations about the extent of the probation crisis come after two damning reports into failures to monitor offenders who went on to commit murders.

His Majesty's Chief Inspector of Probation, Justin Russell, said the service failed at every stage to assess the risk of killer Damien Bendall, who murdered his partner Terri Harris, her two children and their 11-year-old friend.

Mr Russell also said it was impossible to be sure the public was safe because of the quality of work in parts of the Probation Service, after Jordan McSweeney murdered law student Zara Aleena nine days after being released from prison.

The internal figures confirm inspectors' concerns about "unmanageable workloads", Mr Russell said. He added that staff shortages in some parts of the country are "severely" affecting the service's ability to manage offenders, including "those who pose a serious threat to the public".

Probation officers play a critical role assessing how much risk criminals pose to us, during the sentencing process, during...

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